I first met Greg Dyke five years ago. At the time, he was head of Pearson Television, the makers of, among other things, Family Fortunes, The Price is Right and Blind Date. He was a sort of Mister Popular, an everyman's Everyman, the person with the original estuarial accent and commercial television was his metier.

I was writing a 5,000-word profile of him for the Guardian and I thought he might like a posh lunch somewhere to kick things off. 'Forget the restaurant,' he said. 'Come over for a cup of tea.' We eventually spent four hours together in the Pearson canteen. He sent me a note afterwards, written in ink on an old-fashioned-looking card. 'Thanks very much for the piece,' he wrote. 'I'm sure only me and my mum read it to the end.'

Dyke affects to romp through life, a man not interested in journeying with that uncomfortable bedfellow self-doubt. He would refuse to read a management memo that was longer than one side of A4. At the start of this book, he writes: 'I've always believed that autobiographies are ridiculously self-serving and shouldn't be taken too seriously.'

It is a plea to the reader that if he has fallen into 'any of the traps' of pomposity or self-importance, he will be forgiven. He hasn't and he travels much of the way to answering a letter he received from a BBC employee: 'How did a short, bald man with a speech impediment have such an impact?'

How indeed? Like his life, Inside Story is a pacy romp. Dyke writes breathlessly, as if he would like you to be on page 108 by now, when you are still dawdling along in the low nineties. 'Cahm awn,' he says. 'Keep up.'

Of course there are difficulties, as there would be with any book rushed into print on the coat-tails of the post-Hutton era. Dyke describes in what some might consider too meticulous detail the toings and froings on those fateful days in January when Lord Hutton largely cleared the government of wrongdoing over the death of Dr David Kelly, the government scientist, and criticised the BBC for failures of management. He would have done better to have used a broader brush on this particular canvas.

Dyke's forensic examination of the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and their existence or otherwise is well worth understanding, but what this book sometimes fails to deliver is the emotion in the bowels of White City as some very powerful men realised that their careers at the BBC were over.

He says that Alastair Campbell was a 'deranged, vindictive bastard' who became obsessed with beating the BBC, while failing to realise that his own desire to force Downing Street to taste its own medicine could have clouded his judgment.

But these are small matters. Dyke's book is far greater than the episode about the BBC and Iraq, although, doubtless, that is what many will turn to first. His robust dissection of the John Birt years at the BBC neither falls into the trap of being wholly damning or that of simple and simplistic praise. It is a balanced account from a man instinctively opposed to the Birtist methods of management by committee and the 'mission-to-explain' theory of news.

Dyke's explanation of his own leadership style, even when it descends into a somewhat tongue-in-cheek description of the 'cheesy' yellow card staff were urged to wave at boring meetings emblazoned with 'Cut the Crap', is honest and heartfelt. He learned his style from his time studying business in America and working in the commercial sector.

His analysis of the broadcasting industry, the weakness of the BBC governors and how Tony Blair, Campbell and the New Labour hierarchy sought to pressurise Britain's public-service broadcaster should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the complex relationship between the viewer, the television industry and the flexing muscles of the state.

There are moments of levity, such as the time, at the height of the Hutton furore, when he bought the number plate MI6 WMD for his beleaguered colleague Richard Sambrook, the BBC's then director of news.

Then comes the anguish, the feelings of disillusionment, the journey traced from that heady day in May 1997 on the steps of the Royal Festival Hall, where Dyke clapped and hollered as loudly as anyone when Blair proclaimed that a 'new dawn had broken, has it not?' to his present rejection of New Labour orthodoxy.

They will be feelings shared by many Labour supporters, as will the bemusement that seeps through as Dyke grapples with the bigger question of Blair's relationship with his own supporters. Why has it come to this?

Herb Schlosser, the former president of NBC in the United States, wrote as he watched pictures of the spontaneous demonstrations by BBC staff urging Dyke not to resign: 'I saw on the internet BBC employees marching in support of a CEO. This is a first in the Western world.'

In the end, this is a book about a man who reached the top in his career and was forced out in a maelstrom of accusation, claim and stabbing, pointing fingers. Greg Dyke lost his job. As he points out in the last sentence of the book, Tony Blair is still in his.